Re: What's the best hardver for PostgreSQL 8.1?

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Juan Casero wrote:

> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:50:47 -0500
> From: Juan Casero <caseroj(at)comcast(dot)net>
> To: pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [PERFORM] What's the best hardver for PostgreSQL 8.1?
>
> Can you elaborate on the reasons the opteron is better than the Xeon when it
> comes to disk io?

the opteron is cheaper so you have more money to spend on disks :-)

also when you go into multi-cpu systems the front-side-bus design of the
Xeon's can easily become your system bottleneck so that you can't take
advantage of all the CPU's becouse they stall waiting for memory accesses,
Opteron systems have a memory bus per socket so the more CPU's you have
the more memory bandwidth you have.

> The database itself is about 20 gigs
> but I want it to scale to 100 gigs.

how large is the working set? in your tests you ran into swapping on your
1.2G system, buying a dual opteron with 16gigs of ram will allow you to
work with much larger sets of data, and you can go beyond that if needed.

David Lang